InstantGallery: Review & 3 License Giveaway
There are many times that I get back from an event where I have taken a bunch of photos and have wanted to quickly and easily put together a web gallery that was simple and good looking. You know something cool looking and professional.
Now if I had .Mac, I could use the built-in Web Gallery feature to publish a gallery, but for those who do not want to dish out the money for .Mac, InstantGallery might just be the easiest way to create, customize, and publish beautiful web galleries as quickly as possible.
InstantGallery has a very simple and beautiful interface that shows you just the information you need. There is no need to read manuals or how-tos to understand how InstantGallery works. While the interface is simple, InstantGallery also provides you with a variety of options and customizations that can tweak your gallery to your desire. From the first time you open the application to the time you publish your gallery, InstantGallery’s interface is flawless, and very well-thought out.
To begin making your web gallery all you have to do is drag your desired photos into InstantGallery. You are prompted for the name of your gallery and then the InstantGallery window expands to show you your gallery. At this point you are just a click away from the Publish Gallery button and your gallery is done. Pretty simple. Just drag-and-drop, name, and publish. While the galleries don’t look quite as good as the .Mac Web Galleries, the ease-of-use is certainly comparable. But of course, the features of InstantGallery do not stop there. It also allows you to customize and apply advanced features to your gallery that will make it unique and perfectly suited to your liking.
Once you choose the photos for your gallery, they will appear in a default gallery design that looks very much like the popular Flickr photo-sharing site. In fact, the default theme is called “Flickery”. You can easily add or remove photos from your gallery with the plus and minus buttons. The bottom of the window will also tell you the gallery size and the number of photos in the gallery. There is also a very useful bar along the bottom that gives you access to all the main features of InstantGallery. When on a specific picture page you can edit the information about a picture such as the name, tags, and a description. You can also rotate images and apply basic effects such as drop shadows, reflections, and borders. RSS photocasts can be produced with just the click of a button and you can also preview your gallery in different web browsers to see what it will look like when published.
InstantGallery also uses a very handy Options palette that functions much like the Inspector in Apple applications. The options palette controls the features of three main parts of the web gallery–general, the thumbnails, and search. The General tab is where you can change your web gallery to any of the 15 themes provided within Instant Gallery as well as use a custom CSS file to make the web gallery blend in to your website. You can also choose what information you want to display with your photos such as names, captions, and image count. The thumbnail options allow you to choose the size of the thumbnails as well as background color, borders, and shadows. Finally, the search pane allows you to enable searching which is disabled by default as well as the ability to show a tag cloud which is helpful for galleries with lots of pictures.
InstantGallery has a beautiful, fluid interface and produces great-looking web galleries in no time at all. If you don’t have .Mac, it is the cheapest and easiest way to produce web galleries with a couple clicks. It is also full of high end features that will appeal to pros such as the ability to add watermarks and tags to photos. For $25, it is a great investment for any photographer that wants to quickly make and publish a gallery for their website.
ThinkMac, the developers of InstantGallery, have generously offered 3 licenses of InstantGallery to giveaway to our readers. In order to enter the random giveaway, you must comment on this post with suggestions for the developer or features you would like to see in InstantGallery.
The giveaway will end at midnight EST on Wednesday, December 19th, with the winners being announced shortly after that. Good luck!
Built-in FTP and Flash or Ajax web interfaces.
I’ve been toying around with Instant Gallery after seeing it promoted on MacSanta. I like the “mac”ness of it, and simplicity. But that simplicity is also a significant drawback for me. Its themes/features are fairly basic at the moment. It doesn’t have the ability to do nested galleries (i.e. Family > Vacations > Summer 2007). It would also be nice to see a that and/or a few other “eye catching” advanced features thrown in to spice the page up. That said it holds a lot of promise for me. Two things that standout to me are the RSS feature that I think most other photo gallery creators wouldn’t have and the excellent theme designer tutorial. I think it is good right now for those that just need photo gallery creator and will only get better with future versions.
Overall, this does seem to be a very slick, nice program!
I have four ideas:
1) When I make a web page, I like to put in some extra text: a nice description of what the pictures are about, some text like “Cick on a picture to …”
I found it easy to add “Header HTML”, but that goes above the title, which isn’t the right place.
I also found it easy to add “Footer HTML”, but again this goes in the wrong place.
While I can certainly edit the final output (I’m comfortable with HTML), it would be nice if I could simply add a description that showed up on the gallery pages.
An intriguing idea: if people enter text but don’t click an “interpret as HTML” checkbox, you could write the HTML for them. In particular, spaces between paragraphs would put in the and tags. This means that people wouldn’t have to understand HTML.
2) Implement undo. It’s so easy to make little mistakes while making a web page: the freedom granted by Undo would be wonderful.
3) Why do I have to click on “Edit Details” and edit within a separate window? Why can’t I simply edit within the window that you already have? I’m not suggesting a full HTML WYSIWIG editor, but the title and description boxes could be editable right there.
4) I made a web page with three pictures, then realized I wanted to add another picture. I dragged it into the Gallery because that’s how the pictures got there to start with and was startled to see the picture overlaid on my gallery at full size. That’s not what I wanted. When I forced the gallery to redisplay (Click on something else, then the gallery again), it disappeared. When I dragged the pictures into the side bar, it worked as expected. My suggestion: It should work to drop the pictures into the gallery. I still have no idea why it did what it did: when do I want to temporarily overlay a picture on my gallery?
pretty slick. i like how super simple it makes the process of creating a gallery … especially how simple the layouts are. one thing i’d love to see (unless i’m totally missing it) is the ability to click on the right half of the image to go to the next photo … and the left side of the photo will let you click to view the previous photo.
like this … http://www.tomagine.com/?photoblog=20071211
i’d also love to see the option to export a gallery to flash … which would let me embed the gallery in my blog.
thanks!
Flash- and QuickTime-Export would be nice…
And maybe the ability to add some more HTML and Infos…
Sound would be nice too…
iPhoto integration sounds good.
I have used this app in the past and find in very interesting. It does exactly what is advertised, but leaves the user a bit in need of a heftier app. I am hoping that the next version has…
* FTP
* Site management
* Photo Browser
* Basic Design Tools
Definitely iPhoto integration.
Definitely a promising application. I like the simplicity of creating and customizing albums and appreciate the cleanliness of the designs.
Some specific suggestions for the next version:
* iPhoto and Aperture integration is a must for this application to really thrive in a crowded marketplace.
* The templates are nice and clean, but I think more variety is needed.
* Some form of web publishing is essential if this is to be marketed as an alternative to Web Publishing to .Mac. For people who don’t already have a hosting account perhaps they could partner with a hosting company to provide a low cost and easy way to host photo libraries.
* As a test I changed a title from a file name to a longer piece of text (about 75 characters). Instead of word wrapping as I would expect it created a big gap in the layout
My two cents…
Tim
wonderful app, and to avoid duplicating suggestions, here are some mo’ ideas:
1) batch renaming of photos (or group renaming) because if i put up a gallery for fam and friends, many will be downloading these..
2) simple built-in scripts (like sharethis wp plugin) for friends/fam to share with others…
3) regarding watermarks: allow for a simple CODE to remove watermarks (as in: 2 images, friends download and unlock with code)…
I’d love to be able to create hotspots on the photos from within the program, as well as a carousel-type gallery similar to the one in quicktime’s content guide.
Cheers.
I would like to see in this program:
1) slideshows like Lightbox – it is awesome and very popular across web;
2) Unfortunately you can’t just drag’n'drop new photos to existing gallery project. I just love drag’n'drop feature so much
3) and borders for photos… border-less photos are boring
They should add an interface like the .Mac web gallery.
Lightbox integration would be awesome. I love how lightbox displays your full images above the rest of the page. It helps keep your visitors focused. Anyways, just my 2 cents.
Integration with other photo management apps.
I know this has been mentioned a few billion times already, it would be awesome if they through in a media browser for quick access to all of your media files, such as pics directly from iPhoto or music from your iTunes library. Other than that, this app is quite slick and I would find great use for it.
How about a simplified theme/gallery designer so the user can create his own customized web gallery.
Wishlist
+ Built-in scripts and/or script editor
+ Built-in FTP support and/or integration with Transmit, Forklift, Cyberduck or other dedicated FTP app
+ An option to post to Blogger or other popular blogging platforms
Adding basic effects to photos, would be awesome: I think of something similar to what PhotoDrop (http://www.dropping.at/) or Picturesque (http://acqualia.com/picturesque/index.html) do.
Feature Requests:
1) iPhoto or Aperture integration would be great. Possibly a way to automatically update a gallery when photos are added to an album.
2) Drag-and-drop ordering would be nice, instead of having to sort them by name/date.
Have the option of using Lightbox Javascript for viewing images.
Gallery don’t appear to be very Web 2.0
Create a gallery but have the photos pulled from PicasaWeb, Photobucket so you’re not using your webs bandwidth.
support for transferring the gallery to an app like forklift for immediate ftp
I’ve been trying Instant Gallery and it seems a very stable and easy to use application. There are, however, a few things that would be nice to see included on its capacities:
1) Batch rename of images from within IG. That would be very useful make the names of the images more coherent when in a gallery.
2) Cursor on top of thumbnail to reveal comments. If we are dealing with long galleries this will make moving around easier (choose what to see based on the appearing comment).
3) Slideshow (eventually with automatic setup).
It would be nice if instant Gallery integrated with iphoto. I want to see flash galleries that will win over software buyers. And last i want to it to have better templates, more of the style of web 2.0
I would like to have the option of linking each thumbnail individually to another page and not just to the larger image. If you could do that, you could use it for creating a quick online catalog of products. I could have each thumbnail link to a page I created with the larger image and text about the product. I know I would have to create these pages in something else … although, if we can add headers and footers in InstantGallery, maybe we could also have an option to add additional HTML text under the large image?
Maybe also the ability to create smart galleries from tags.
I agree on the option to be able to run a slideshow.
HTML editor would be nice. also, built-in FTP client
The giveaway is now over, the winners will be announced in a few days.
For what it does, InstantGallery looks very nice. Much nicer in fact than the similar products I’ve seen that are available for Mac.
Those that commented about iPhoto integration and built-in uploading might want to check out Pomoto ( http://www.pomoto.com ). It’s basically an independent alternative to .Mac web galleries. Full disclosure, I’m with Pomoto, but I think Pomoto is fully relevant to this discussion.
[...] week, we reviewed and ran a giveaway for InstantGallery, an application that allows you to make beautiful web galleries quickly and [...]